A station may establish a connection to a wireless communications network via a base station (e.g., an eNodeB (eNB) in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks). To properly be prepared for demodulating transmitted signals (i.e., received signals), the station must be configured with proper settings.
Specifically, properties related to the physical layer of the transceiver used to connect to the network must be known. For example, the channel (e.g., band of frequencies) must be known for the incoming signal in order for it to be properly received. While connected to the network, reference symbols are transmitted from a base station of the network to the station. The reference symbols may be used as a basis for calculating a variety of wireless properties, in particular, for channel estimation.
Within the LTE networks, a particular channel used therein is a Multicast-Broadcast Single-Frequency Network (MBSFN). In the MBSFN, the channel impulse response (CIR) may be used as the basis for the channel estimation. A MBSFN subframe may be provided from the base station to the station that includes a plurality of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols. These OFDM symbols may be constructively organized into a grid based upon slot (i.e., time) and frequency. There may be reference symbols that are inserted at predetermined positions within the grid. In one particular example, when viewing a row of OFDM symbols from symbol 0 to symbol 11, the reference symbols may be positioned at symbols 2, 6, and 10 for the MBSFN. To estimate the channel using less processing, a destaggering manner is used in which the CIRs of symbols 4 and 8 are used for the channel estimation. However, when the station is in motion or otherwise experiences a Doppler effect, a relatively high Doppler effect in conjunction with the destaggering manner smears the channel variation over time and leads to inferior channel estimation results.